'Walking Dead' Star Adapting 'Aquariums of Pyongyang' (Exclusive)

Steven Yeun will executive produce the Radar Pictures feature and star as Chol-Hwan.

The Walking Dead's Steven Yeun is setting his sights on the big screen.

Yeun is teaming with Radar Pictures to adapt Kang Chol-Hwan's autobiographical book The Aquariums of Pyongyang, The Hollywood Reporter has learned exclusively. Yeun is attached to star as Chol-Hwan and exec produce the film, and will work alongside producers Ted Field, Mike Weber and Michael Napoliello in partnership with Sean Lee.

Aquariums is set in North Korea, one of the last bastions of hardline Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on the one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea.

Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, the book is a record of one man's triumph over unbelievable adversity to expose the truths of North Korea to the modern world.

For Yeun, who has been a regular on AMC's The Walking Dead since its inception, the role continues a slow and calculated push into movies. Aquariums joins his voice gig in Chew, the animated feature adaptation of the best-selling comic by John Layman and Rob Guillory. He next has the feature I Origins due in July.